What Does a Human-Centred Organisation Even Mean?

A guide to building the kind of company people don't want to leave.

Lina Mileskaite

12 min read

Let me tell you a story about Rebecca, a composite built from patterns that show up again and again across founder-led companies.

Six months ago, she joined a company and fell for it hard. Warm onboarding, Slack channels that made her laugh, a box of fancy chocolates on her desk with a note: “Welcome. Let’s build great things together.” She felt chosen. She walked in with years of experience, a head full of sharp ideas, and that buzzy energy you get when you’re sure you’re about to do the best work of your life.

Then, month two arrived, and she started noticing things.

They were small at first.

The daily “check-ins” where nobody actually checked in. People just read their to-do lists out loud in the flattest voice known to humankind. The end-of-day “check-out” emails that vanished into a void nobody read. She shrugged it off. Everyone else has been there for years, so it must be fine.

Then she did the exact thing they’d hired her to do. She spotted a broken process, gave up a weekend to build a proper proposal, researched it, pulled the data, mapped the gaps, and laid out precisely how it would make everyone’s life easier.

Her boss said, “Love this energy. Let’s park it for now.”

It was never mentioned again.

She tried the next month. New idea, same quality, same polite dismissal. None of her suggestions made the priority list, because the priority was always firefighting.

And I’m sure you know the kind. The “emergencies” that could’ve been prevented six months ago if anyone had the time to fix the root cause. The calls that should’ve been two-line messages. The plans she rebuilt three times because priorities shifted like sand under her feet.

So she stopped.

One evening, she opened her job description again and realised that it had almost nothing to do with her actual days. The capable, energised person who walked in on day one is barely recognisable.

She raised it with her manager more than once, but nothing changed.

The boss was certain the company was wonderful. That people were lucky to be there. But somehow, every single colleague she spoke to privately disagreed.

So she handed in her notice. When people asked whether they should stick it out, she gave them the honest version: run, and don’t look back.

Here’s the thing about Rebecca - she wasn’t fresh out of uni; she’d worked across a bunch of companies and industries, doing similar jobs for years. She knew what it felt like to be somewhere that wanted her brain, not just run around executing tasks. And she knew the other feeling too: slowly drowning inside a system that looks fine on paper while secretly suffocating everyone in it. She could tell the difference. That’s why she got out so fast.

The Wider Picture

Rebecca's story isn't unusual. If you go online and read some forums, you will find countless examples of people feeling frustrated due to similar experiences.

Every year, Gallup asks hundreds of thousands of workers across 160+ countries how their working lives actually feel. In 2025, only 20% of them said they were engaged. Which means that if you have five people on a call, only one of them is really present, while the other four are firing off check-out emails and nodding through the standup while mentally lying on a beach somewhere, dreaming about better days.

That disengagement cost the global economy around $10 trillion in a single year. Neither of us will ever see a penny of it, so forget the trillions. What I actually notice is something “smaller”: how hard it is to find a workplace that someone intentionally designed to be good to work in.

And it’s getting worse. 2025 was the second year in a row of falling engagement, with not one region on the planet improving. Even the managers are drowning - their engagement slid from 27% to 22% in a single year. So the people who are meant to notice when someone like Rebecca is checking out are too busy worrying about themselves to notice it.

It’s a bit scary, and it's definitely not how people should be spending their working lives.

Why this keeps happening

Over the last 20 or 30 years, companies upgraded everything: new tech, new software, new platforms, AI-driven tools. The stack got shinier and more sophisticated every year.

But the people part got left on factory settings.

How we structure work, make decisions, hand out authority, give feedback, define roles, measure who’s “doing well”: most of it hasn’t really budged since the early 1900s. We’re running modern companies on management ideas built for assembly lines and shift whistles, from an era that treated workers as interchangeable parts who needed watching.

Frederick Taylor’s scientific management made sense for the factories that needed it back then. The problem now is that modern companies still run the same playbook, they just gave it friendlier names. Command-and-control became “alignment.” Top-down became “strategic direction.” Surveillance became “visibility.” And the daily standup became a “check-in” that checks nothing except whether you look busy enough.

Most of the work we do now (the thinking, the creative problem-solving, the relationship-building, the stuff that actually makes money) needs exactly the things factory management was built to remove: autonomy, judgment, initiative, trust. So, of course, it’s not working.

Rebecca walked in with all four. The company never made room for them, and that was enough to lose her.

There’s An Actual International Standard For This

There is a real, official international standard for human-centred organisations, published in 2016 by ISO. It’s called ISO 27500.

It sits behind a paywall, which likely explains why relatively few leaders have engaged with it directly. In summary, it recommends:

Treat people’s differences as a strength, not a headache. Stop designing around some imaginary “standard person.” Build roles around real strengths. Notice that one person thinks best out loud in a meeting while another needs 24 hours to send you something three times better, and roll with it.

Make usability and accessibility actual goals. Before you unleash a shiny new internal tool, ask the people who’ll live in it whether it makes their work easier or harder. Then act on the answer.

Fix the system, not the symptom. Low morale? The reflex is to bolt on a wellbeing perk. Bad communication? Gather everyone in one room. But a struggling team is almost never the actual problem. It’s usually something upstream: unclear priorities, clashing incentives, a feedback loop that loops back to nowhere. Patch the symptom, and it grows back. Fix the root, and it doesn’t.

Treat health, safety, and wellbeing as real priorities, not a mindfulness app that pings you a breathing exercise at 2 p.m. while you’re in back-to-backs until 6 p.m. Make workload an actual conversation. Train managers to spot someone struggling before their output tanks, not after.

Give people work that means something. When people get why their work matters, not just what to ship, they show up with a completely different kind of attitude. Build roles around real contribution. And when priorities shift, explain the why, not just the what.

Be actually open, not performatively transparent. Watch out for “transparency theatre,” where you share a lot of information but only the flattering bits. Real openness flows up as well as down, and bad news should travel as fast as the good stuff.

Be socially responsible as standard, because companies that act as if they exist in a bubble eventually find the bubble works both ways: in talent, trust, and reputation.

So that’s the standard to aim for if you want to be considered human-centred, which basically means build a company around how people actually think, feel, and work, instead of forcing them to contort themselves around systems designed for an era long gone.

And it’s a good start, but I think it’s the bare minimum.

In the same way that minimum wage and statutory holidays are the bare minimum. People are grateful to have them, but nobody’s out there thriving just because the company does what’s legally required of them.

What follows below is the layer above that baseline, drawn from decades of organisational and psychological research.

What People Need at Work

Three psychological needs run the whole show. Autonomy (I do things how I want to do them), competence (I’m growing and my skills get used), and relatedness (real connection, not forced fun). Meet these, and people get motivated, creative, and resilient. Starve them, and people check out, burn out, or turn into compliance robots that don’t really care. This is Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory, and it’s about as close to a law of human motivation as we’ve got.

Resources buffer demands. High demand plus high resources? Exhilarating. High demand plus low resources? The exact recipe for burnout. Most small companies fixate on managing demands (workload, priorities) while stripping the resources (cutting feedback, micromanaging away autonomy, never explaining the why). Match the two.

Burnout is systemic, not personal. Maslach found six culprits: too much workload, too little control, not enough reward, broken community, unfairness, and a clash between your values and the job’s. Spot which one’s biting and fix it before it becomes a resignation letter.

Our brains treat social threat like physical danger. When our status is threatened, when a role is unclear, when we have no control, or when we are feeling left out or treated unfairly, our brains react as if we were in actual danger. Cortisol spikes, the calm, creative part goes offline, and our thinking shrinks. Not ideal. Also pure biology. That’s David Rock’s SCARF model. Design work to turn the threat down and turn safety, progress, and competence up.

Protecting Focus and Energy

Async by default, live only when async is not cutting it. Write things down with enough context that a question can be answered without a meeting. The burden of being clear sits with the sender. That always-on, reply-this-second pressure is one of the most reliable predictors of cognitive overload.

Keep a predictable rhythm. Give the week a clear, shared shape: when decisions get made, when you collaborate, and when deep work is protected. Predictable time lowers everyone’s mental load, because nobody’s braced for a surprise meeting they don’t want to have landing at any moment. It doesn’t mean identical schedules, just a skeleton everyone can plan around.

Protect deep work. Gloria Mark’s research at UC Irvine found that it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption. And by one much-quoted estimate, pointless meetings cost US businesses around $37 billion a year. On top of that, most of us only have about 4 to 5 hours of truly focused work in us a day, not 8+. Being “always on” is bad for people; design against it.

Design for recovery, not just output. Bodies run on roughly 90-minute focus cycles, so allow people to work in blocks and then actually rest. Protect real breaks (a walk, a chat, something people would really enjoy, not doom-scrolling while eating at the desk). Honour working hours, discourage after-hours pings, and treat holidays as a real right.

Respect chronotypes. Shoving everyone into the same 9-to-5 box creates a mismatch between when people are expected to perform and when they actually can. Evening types forced into early starts can perform up to 30% worse. So offer flexible start and finish times, keep the collaborative stuff in the midday overlap when everyone’s awake, and trust people to build their deep work around their own energy.

Test a four-day work week. It won't suit every business, but the 2022 UK pilot run by 4 Day Week Global (61 companies, roughly 2,900 employees) recorded a 57% drop in staff turnover, burnout falling for 71% of participants, and a 65% reduction in sick days, with revenue holding steady. 56 of the 61 companies kept the model afterwards. It’s about cutting performative busyness, not doing less of the work that matters.

Structuring The Company Itself

Stay small on purpose. Small companies shouldn’t try to mimic big ones. Their superpower is speed of learning and how tight-knit they can be. The ideal knowledge team is 4 to 6 people, because communication links explode as you grow (5 people is 10 links, 10 people is 45), and psychological safety gets shaky above 8 to 10 people in a team. Bezos called it the two-pizza rule: if two pizzas can’t feed the team, the team’s too big.

Push decisions to where the information lives. Founder dependency is the classic small-company trap. Let the person doing the work make the operational call within clear guardrails. Some teams use the advice process: you can make the decision, you just have to get advice from the experts and the people it’ll affect first.

Get roles right. Roles need to be clear enough that people know what they own and loose enough that they can reach past it. Role ambiguity is a real stressor (cue low-level, all-day anxiety), but people who feel they can stretch beyond their job title are more proactive and engaged. So give people a clear core plus an open invitation to expand. Everybody wins.

Allow job crafting. Within their role, let people reshape the tasks they do, who they work with, and how they think about why it matters, to fit who they are. A simple recurring question does most of the work: is there a way we could shape this so it fits you better? It costs almost nothing and reliably lifts engagement.

Lead by serving. Servant leadership, where the leader’s actual job is the growth and effectiveness of their people, is linked to higher engagement, more trust, more creativity, and less turnover and burnout. Leaders should focus on clearing the blockers, holding the meaning, growing people, guarding the boundaries of what the company stands for, and noticing when something’s off before it’s too late.

Anchor the company in purpose and accountability. Be clear about why the company exists beyond profit, and hold yourself accountable to the people your decisions affect (workers, customers, community), not just shareholders. This is the heart of what B Corp checks and what Scotland’s Fair Work Framework treats as a two-way deal between employer and worker. Companies that weave purpose and accountability into how they actually make decisions tend to keep their values when revenue dips, exactly when it’s easiest to abandon.

Building a Culture People Don’t Want to Leave

Build psychological safety on purpose. Edmondson found that it’s the strongest predictor of team learning and performance, even above raw talent. You build it by going first as a leader (admit you’re unsure, own your mistakes, ask for help), treating work as learning rather than a test, reacting well to the first time someone brings bad news, and actively pulling in the quieter voices.

Make disagreement and feedback normal. Once safety exists, this is what should come next. Spread the talking so it isn’t just the loudest two voices (balanced turn-taking is a marker of smart teams - don’t force quiet people to speak up, but definitely ask if they would like to contribute either in the meeting or afterwards), ask more than you tell, debrief failures instead of hunting for someone to blame, and make feedback small, frequent and two-way rather than a dreaded once-a-year event.

Default to transparency. Share the meeting notes, document the reasoning behind decisions, give access to the financials, and make the roadmap visible. People hate being kept in the dark, and information lets them act on their own initiative. Write things down as a form of care, not bureaucracy, so people who weren’t in the room can still act, and new starters can get going without draining your most experienced people.

Onboard newcomers like they actually matter. The first 90 days decide whether someone ends up capable, connected, and clear, or confused, isolated, and halfway out the door. Structured check-ins, a buddy who isn’t their manager, real work early (not just watching from the sidelines), and an honest tour of the unwritten rules are all non-negotiable.

Design for real inclusion, not assimilation. Belonging plus uniqueness equals inclusion. Belonging minus uniqueness is assimilation, where everyone conforms to the dominant group: the person with ADHD masks their style, the introvert performs extraversion in every meeting. It looks like harmony to you, but it feels like suppression to them. Build for difference as a genuine resource.

Treat neurodiversity as design, not accommodation. Around 15 to 20% of people are neurodivergent in some meaningful way, often with real strengths in pattern recognition, hyperfocus, and divergent thinking. Accommodation says: we've got a standard system, and we'll make exceptions for you. Design says: we'll build for different brains from the start. Multiple ways to communicate, options for solo deep work, flexible routes to the same result. And please don’t frame it as “something’s wrong with you, and we’re being kind.” They belong in the group because they’re part of the group.

Pay fairly and recognise specifically. Fair pay, transparency where you can manage it, and serious investment in recognition that ties effort to actual impact. A generic “great job!” does nothing, but the specific stuff gets remembered for years.

Invest in growth. Stagnation is a leading cause of disengagement, and eventually departure. Deliberate practice aimed at real weak spots, stretch assignments with support (not chucking people in the deep end, which is trauma, not development, and yes, I’ve watched it happen and lived it), and learning built into the actual week instead of a budget nobody is brave enough to touch because they’re too busy.

Design the physical and remote environment deliberately. People need meaningful control over their immediate working environment, and open-plan offices often do the opposite of what’s promised. Natural light, plants, quiet, and comfortable temperature (productivity peaks around 21 to 22°C) beat a windowless room with a pool table any day. And let people choose office or remote work where the work allows. People value that flexibility as much as an 8% pay rise, and productivity and happiness tend to climb too.

What it Looks Like In Practice

Inside a company built this way, people stop performing busyness, because they're measured on outcomes rather than visible presence. Disagreement becomes comfortable rather than risky. Attention has room to be sustained rather than constantly fractured, so problem-solving becomes possible rather than perpetual firefighting.

People are treated as individuals rather than role-holders: known strengths are used, known struggles are supported, and the work bends to fit the person rather than the reverse. Bad news travels early so leaders can actually do something about it. People recommend the place to their peers because they actually want to be there and think others will too.

And I believe people leave work happier and more whole, carrying that into the rest of their lives.

This is the thinking that underpins the organisational design work done through Consciously Designed - helping founder-led, mission-driven companies close the gap between the culture they intend to build and the one that's actually operating day to day. If any part of Rebecca's story, or the research above, sounds familiar from the inside of your own company, that's usually the starting point for a useful conversation.

I have also prepared a more detailed resource on how to build a human-centred organisation here.